Long Earth

… nuns somehow knew what you were up to wherever you were …. (LE)

‘Not every action carries symbolic freight.’
‘Every human action does.’ (LE)

‘But smart has to have a depth as well as a length. Some smart brushes over a problem. And some smart grinds exceedingly slow, like the mills of God, and it grinds fine, and when it comes up with an answer, it has been tested.’ (LE)

You always had to be very careful around Sarah. She wasn’t a Problem, but problems had happened to her. (LE)

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn’t be much of a career path, would it? (LE}

‘You don’t believe in modesty, do you, Mr Lobsang?’
‘Absolutely not, Henry. Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.’ (LE)

… despite a nationwide debate it appeared that no two Frenchmen could agree exactly on what being French did mean. Although another school of thought held that arguing about what made you French was part of what made you French. (LE)

… where there is panic, profit isn’t far behind. (LE)

… the nuns were all possessed of laser eyesight and over-the-horizon hearing … (LE)

‘…. Whatever the truth of the universe was, it certainly wasn’t something that could have been discerned by a quarrelsome bunch of antique ecclesiasticals.’ (LE)

‘… you are not only very fluent in English, but also fluent in England, which means a lot down here.’ (LE)

There are moments when terror is like a treacle that slows down time. (LE)

… when your name is really and truly Percy Blakeney, pronounced ‘Black-knee’, and you still have bad acne in your twenties, you accept Pimple as a nickname and are grateful that it wasn’t anything worse. (LE)

‘A surfeit of wonders will dull the mind.’ (LE)

… he’d thought a wild surmise was some kind of exotic bird. Well, he was now looking out over new worlds with somewhat of a tame surmise. (LE)

‘Generally speaking,’ Lobsang pronounced, ‘reality having little sense of narrative, ancient sites are not heavy with swinging blades that decapitate, or rock panels that fold back to fire darts. It’s rather a shame isn’t it?’ (LE)

‘Extinct. Now there’s a terrible word if you like. A word beyond death, because extinction means your children are dead too, and your grandchildren and their children will never even be born.’ (LE)

‘Humans start with the world as it is and try and make it different. And that’s what makes them interesting.’ (LE)

You need time for big and complicated new concepts to shake themselves down in your brain slowly, without damaging what is already there. (LE)

And Joshua felt oddly uncomfortable, once more. A slight feeling you get when everything is so right that it might have gone all the way around the universe and come back metamorphosed into wrong. (LE)

‘The whole place is so decent, level-headed and likeable it can make you scream, and then curse yourself for screaming.’ (LE)

‘What you have to realise about madmen is that they’re mad.’ (LE)

Linsay was a left ear person, Valiente realised. He had seen plenty of them: their eyes glazed slightly and they stared fixedly at your left ear, while their mouths spouted the truth about flying saucers, the great world conspiracy, or one-born-every-minute evangelism. Inside everyone was a left ear person waiting to get out. (LE)

‘Mankind isn’t really evil. It hasn’t got enough dignity to be evil.’ (LE)

She didn’t look like a mass murderer, but Linsay recalled that mass murderers never did. (LE)